Kunigami, Andre Keiji: Travel Grant - 2016-2017

College:

College of Arts and Sciences

Department:

Asian Studies

Project Title:

Seeing From the South: filmic vision and the affected spectator in Brazilian modernism

Project Abstract:

With this proposal I will research the photographs of Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade; and the writings and documents surrounding Mário Peixoto's landmark avant-garde film Limite (1930). As part of my comparative dissertation between Brazilian and Japanese modernisms, my hypothesis is that film constituted an "affected spectator" invested with a political mode of sensorial and non-distanced vision, which problematizes usual theories on the political-aesthetic role of the spectator while deterritorializing notions of the "non-West." With the Mario Einaudi travel grant I intend to visit the archive of Mário de Andrade at the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP), and the Mário Peixoto Archive, in Rio de Janeiro.